PZ Myers. 2005 Apr 10. The proper reverence due those who have gone before. <http://pharyngula.org/index/weblog/the_proper_reverence_due_those_who_have_gone_before/>. Accessed 2008 Aug 30.
Posted on M00o93H7pQ09L8X1t49cHY01Z5j4TT91fGfr on Sunday, April 10, 2005
The proper reverence due those who have gone before
Some people might think I'm a rather morbid fellow. Years ago, when I was an undergraduate lackey at the University of Washington and working at the med school, there, I made a wonderful discovery one lunch hour: a bone room. Tucked away in an odd corner of the building was a room full of shelves stacked with cardboard boxes, each one containing the bones of some individual who'd left their remains to science. They'd been thoroughly cleaned and disarticulated, and many had parts sawed apart so you could peer into the sinuses or the hollow spaces for marrow or poke around in the caverns of the cranium. It became my favorite quiet, private place. I could putter about reassembling someone, or just contemplate some scrap of bone for a Yorick moment.
Look at a humerus, for instance. It's elegant. You can see the traces of the muscle insertions that worked it in life, and its entire form is a product of the combination of a general genetic specification and a detailed, day-to-day remodeling response to the forces the individual applied to it. A pelvis or vertebra are sculptures, intricate and odd. And a skull is a personal relic, a last vestige of a face someone knew well and loved without knowing all the wonderful knobs and seams and hollows buried under the flesh.
That's another thing; a bone isn't just beautiful operational engineering, it's a trace of a person. It's a melancholy memento of all that's been lost…here is this human being who struggled and loved and dreamed and hurt for sixty years, and all that I had of her was a few exquisitely patterned swirls of hydroxyapatite. So much was gone, so much lost, and that's the fate of all of us—all it takes is a few generations for all personal memory to fade away, and all that's left is abstractions. For most of us, there won't even be bits of dry bone in a box in a forgotten room, we'll be ash and slime, our existence unremembered.
Maybe, though, while we are personally unacknowledged, there will be some trace left in the genes of several times great grandchildren, or in a few words preserved in a library, or in some tiny nudge we've given history. That's all I aim for, that I can sow a seed that will in turn sow a seed that will sow a seed that…and so it goes. That's enough.
I am not a religious person by any means (that is a bit of an understatement), but I can feel something of the same reverence for the Bible that I do for a piece of bone. It's a record, spotty and incomplete and flawed, of human lives, that leaves out far more than it includes. It's not as pretty as a bone, but then it is representative of some of the ugliness of human history, as well as of some of the poetry. I can appreciate it as a slice of a few thousand years of the events and beliefs of one fairly influential tribe of people. There are a lot of lives and time, mostly unmentioned, bound up in that book.
I want to try something, though, with the intent of getting a point about the history of humanity across. Let me reduce the Bible to an icon, a few pixels to stand for the whole thing, here:
Imagine that is a Bible sitting on a shelf. My tiny black bar of pixels is a placeholder to represent everything in it, not to minimize it; if you have a grand view of the Bible's contents, that's fine, those few pixels should then conjure up your memory of historic events and aspirations and people who loved and raised families and created art and fought for what they believed in. And for those of us with less romantic visions of the Bible, it represents thousands of years of war and folly and pain and loss. No matter what, it's a big thing, a huge thing, and I've reduced it to a cartoon of the spine of a black-bound book for convenience. Just for now, keep in mind that it stands for 2000 years and the lives of hundreds of thousands or millions of people.
Here's another representation. That picture to the left is one of the Laetoli footprints. Once upon a time in East Africa, there was a volcanic eruption that deposited a coat of fine-grained ash on the landscape, which was then wetted by rain to form a vast sheet like firm cement over everything in the region. Two, maybe three, people walked across the sheet, leaving their footprints behind in a material that would then harden in the sun, preserving their trail. We don't know anything about who they were, where they were coming from, or where they were going. We can imagine; they were walking together, one person larger than the other (a man and a woman? A woman and a child?), in a barren landscape wrecked by the volcano. This was certainly a life-changing tragedy, a catastrophe that upset everything they hoped for. They were living through a disaster of Biblical proportions, and all we have left is a few lonely footprints, no other record of their life or their struggles remains.
These people were our very distant ancestors, small-brained and lightly boned, but with a human posture. They were probably Australopithecus afarensis, and this earthshaking event occurred 3.6 million years ago. It may be presumptuous to call them "people", "man", or "woman", since they aren't classified as human, but still…from what we know of our closest living relatives, the chimpanzees, they certainly cared and felt and thought, and are somewhere closer still to us in our family tree, and I'll recognize that they at least had something close to human feelings.
Here's another icon, a few bits of bone from another australopithecine, Lucy. Like the relics in those cardboard boxes from the bone room, we know little about Lucy the thinking, acting, living being. She was a small female, less than four feet tall, living in old Africa. We can imagine that she had family, she lived in a group or tribe, she foraged, she had hungry days and full days, she courted or was courted, she had moments of happiness and moments of grief. All of the things she thought most important are gone and lost to knowledge, and all we have now are these few bones. When I hold the femur of a man dead 50 years, I can feel the sorrow of a life lost to me; how much more reverence should we feel for these bones of a person from a world gone 3.2 million years?
And look at how much is lost. Between the time of the couple fleeing across a field of volcanic ash and poor dead Lucy lies 400,000 years. If a Bible is a record of the struggle of a people for 2,000 years, we'd need 200 Bibles to tell us the tale of just this one obscure, remote branch of our lineage.
Two hundred Bibles that were never written, books that even had they existed would be gone now. There was a vast history of events reduced now to nothing but a few footprints and a scattering of bones.
Here's one more tragedy (what's left to us is a record of the dead, and it's hard to avoid the sense that human history is one long tragedy. Joy is rarely preserved). The picture to the left is the bones of Nariokotome boy, another skeleton from Africa, this time of a pre-teen Homo erectus. We can refer to these as human now, with no worry of picky quibbles that these are mere animal remains. These bones also disturb my imagination even more. I'm a father; these are the bones of a young man, maybe 12 years old, and he's tall and strong. In those dangerous days, I can picture the parents of such a robust boy feeling relief; he's well past those risky years of high mortality, when one would have been reluctant to become attached to an infant likely to be carried away by some disease or brief famine. Here instead is a vigorous young fellow on the edge of adulthood, someone to carry on the line, someone to help on the hunt, someone to be proud of, and suddenly, he's dead.
You wonder—did his mother weep over him?
Nariokotome boy died 1.6 million years ago. Between Lucy and this lost son, how many Eves weeping over dead Abels where there? Enough to fill 800 Bibles.
Now here's the shocking thing; Nariokotome boy only takes us halfway from Lucy to the modern day. We need 800 more books in this hypothetical lost library of humankind.
Remember, each black bar is an icon representing a long, elaborate book on the scale of the Bible, which in turn is only a small representative subset of the human experience over a span of time. So much has been lost to us, and those few scraps we do have must stand in proxy for such a burden of history.
And, you know, there are people now who claim that one book is sufficient, that it is complete, that it is enough to explain who we are and where we came from.
Strangely enough, these are the same people who claim to be "spiritual". To me, though, they are the ahistorical, unthinking ones who fail to offer the proper reverence due those who have gone before.
(crossposted to the American Street)
Personal • Science • 6 Trackbacks • Other weblogs • Permalink
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PZ, this is one of the most insightful and thought-provoking essays I've ever read of yours. A beautiful piece that deserves a wider audience.
-Matt#: Posted by on 04/10 at 01:10 PM -
Wow. Just--wow.
#: Posted by on 04/10 at 01:12 PM
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People have long said the a "picture is worth a thousand words". I can only hope that a thousand of my little pictures can move somebody they way your words here moved me. Thanks PZ.
#: Posted by on 04/10 at 01:21 PM
- That was fantastic.
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This is gorgeous.Thank you.
#: Posted by on 04/10 at 01:57 PM
- Beautiful, moving and wise.
- Excellent piece buddy.
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'Wow' is certainly the word to describe this. Great job!
#: Posted by WolverineTom on 04/10 at 02:33 PM
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You just created the most amazing library. Stunning presentation of a profound idea.
#: Posted by Rexroth's Daughter on 04/10 at 02:39 PM
- That was beautiful. Thank you.
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Damn, guy! You're not only my favorite biologist, but you're getting up there in the poet rankings!
And do med schools really need skeletons/cadavers? I'm damn sure not going to need this one in a couple or three more decades. How is that done?#: Posted by on 04/10 at 03:05 PM -
A brilliant piece that I thoroughly enjoyed...thanks for sharing with us.
#: Posted by on 04/10 at 03:08 PM
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A Yorick moment?..balahahaHAHAHA!
OK, I like that quite a bit...#: Posted by on 04/10 at 03:17 PM -
It is getting more and more difficult to leave your bones to science. There is nobody in the USA who will articulate the human skeleton for classroom use, so schools buy plastic skeletons or order expensive ones from Germany.
Mary Roach's book "Stiff" covers many different ways one can have one's body used (or disposed of) after one's death. It is a wealth of information on everything from silage (and planting a tree in it), to the use in forensic science (various kinds). A great read and you will never think about death the same way again. -
"So much was gone, so much lost, and that's the fate of all of us—all it takes is a few generations for all personal memory to fade away, and all that's left is abstractions. For most of us, there won't even be bits of dry bone in a box in a forgotten room, we'll be ash and slime, our existence unremembered."
This actually speaks to a question I've had for a couple of years now, one that's never going to be answered: who were the Piltdown Men? Two medieval Britons, living their lives at the close of the 13th century, wholly unaware that six hundred years after their deaths they would become unwitting accomplices to the greatest fraud in scientific history. It's entirely possible that there's some record of their lives in some parish church, something to tell us who they were before they were reinterred in the quarry. But there's no way to make the connection between any written record and the bone scraps. I also wonder whether or not they had children. It's entirely possible that the descendants of Piltown Man have spread all over the globe, that they fought in the American Revolution, were sent to Botany Bay, or were part of the colonial apparatus in Africa and India. Some of their descendants may still be in England, and all of them, if they exist, are unaware of their deep connection to the Piltdown Hoax.#: Posted by on 04/10 at 03:49 PM -
Damn. If I get all teary-eyed in my next Anthropology class, I'm so gonna hold you responsible. So much for academic detachment and objectivity . . . .
#: Posted by on 04/10 at 04:00 PM
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Wow.
Oh, how I wish we had that library!
"Alas for the lost lore, the annals and old poets . . ." -J.R.R. Tolkien - and he was only thinking of Classical times, not this vast and all-but-vanished span!
But we have our stories, where we can weave in a few brief references to the past, to other, older tales . . . -
So you really have been reading THE ANCESTOR'S TALE...ha.
Thanks for the good essay. People definately need to do more to show that there is potential for great 'meaning' in a secular life.#: Posted by on 04/10 at 04:51 PM -
in line with Piltdown men descendents and such:
"Science finds man's great, great, great, great...
By Sue Leeman
Associated Press Writer
LONDON -- It's the ultimate family tree.
A bemused British teacher has discovered he can trace his ancestry back 9,000 years -- to ''Cheddar Man,'' the skeleton of a Stone Age hunter-gatherer who lived in southwestern England.
''I am overwhelmed, a bit surprised,'' said Adrian Targett, when a TV film crew presented him with the results of an Oxford University study Friday [this was in 1997] that showed his DNA closely matched the skeleton's.
''I was just about to say I hope it's not me.''
. . . Targett, 42, lives in the town of Cheddar, just a half-mile from the cave where Cheddar Man violently died, from what archaeologists believe was probably a blow to the face."
http://www.ardmoreite.com/stories/030997/news/news21.html -
Meaning is something that is intrinsic and personal, occasionally shared. I hit the drive-thru at Wendy's and think nothing of it, but to John Edwards and his wife, they eat at Wendy's. (http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/5443316/)
When I was but an EKG tech during medical school, I went to the ICU to get a tracing on a patient who was quite worried and preoccupied. With some coaxing, she told me that her mother had died in that very room about one year earlier. I told her that bad things had happened in that room, but also good things. People's lives had been saved in that room. What made that room significant to her was not universal.
Similarly, we see bones, or Bibles, or crosses, or the separation of church and state. And these things have significance to each of us. Or maybe they don't.
Brilliant post, doc.
BCH#: Posted by Burt Humburg on 04/10 at 06:18 PM -
I don't know what new, meaningful comment I can add here. That was elegant. If you can shop that around for publication somewhere, I'd do so.
I'm also envious. It's SUCH a simple notion, I don't know why I never thought to give it the consideration you have. Oh, I suppose I've thought of it briefly, but never have I really faced it. To think of the untold stories, the untold histories, the broad tales of the struggles of societies, their achievements and failures, and the threads of each individual person...#: Posted by on 04/10 at 07:41 PM -
Sucked.
#: Posted by on 04/10 at 08:15 PM
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One more attaboy. Gets the brain cooking.
Wouldnt it be cool to weight the icons for population? Then use a similar concept to drive home the risks to the environment, oil supplies, food supplies etc into the future due to that population growth. Or to notice that the number of people who belonged to that bibilical tribe might be little more than enough to make up a fair sized cult today.#: Posted by on 04/10 at 10:17 PM -
Eeensy-weensy, teensy-tiny quibble: unless you're counting the New Testament only (and I don't see why you would), you should probably date the Bible back to the Old Testament, which is closer to 6,000-7,000 years old.
Still a miniscule drop in the bucket in the range of time we're talking about, of course. I have a very entertaining book on my shelf called Every Goy's Guide to Common Jewish Expressions where the author explains that the word for unkosher/unclean foods, treyf, literally means, "torn from the flesh of a living animal."
The author, Arthur Naiman, says, "Imagine a society where you had to tell people to kill animals before eating them and you get some idea of how old Judaism is."
And yet even that time is almost close enough to touch, in terms of relative time.#: Posted by on 04/11 at 12:44 AM -
unless you're counting the New Testament only (and I don't see why you would), you should probably date the Bible back to the Old Testament, which is closer to 6,000-7,000 years old.
No, the Old Testament was written between about 1,000 B.C. and about 200 A.D.#: Posted by on 04/11 at 12:53 AM -
Thanks, Alon -- I was going by the date of the Jewish calendar, which currently says it's the year 5765. So they, at least, claim 6,000 years, even if not for the actual book.
Though now I think I'm getting myself all confused. I should say for the record that I'm not Jewish, though my niece and nephew are.#: Posted by on 04/11 at 01:01 AM -
I think that the idea is that the Old Testament was known to be first committed to parchment no earlier than 1000 BCE, but it claims to depict events in the course of the history of Israel that happened around 4000 BCE or so.
Not that I'd know myself - I haven't really paid much attention to Mesopotamian archaeology.#: Posted by on 04/11 at 03:13 AM -
This is a brilliant piece of writing - thanks PZ.
#: Posted by on 04/11 at 03:14 AM
- That's beautiful.
- Apart from the long list of begats in Genesis 5, which you can consider a Prologue, the Old Testament covers the period roughly from 1900 B.C. to 600 B.C. If memory serves, the Three Patriarchs supposedly lived in 1700 B.C.
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A Tear for Australopithecus
On the edge of
Lake Turkana,
where the forest
abruptly ends -
You took the
first steps-
to feel the
Open wind.
Within your world
of beauty
and instinct,
the Savannah
beckoning -
The hand of
your companion,
leads you back
to your clan.
The food and
shelter
don't matter now,
a child is forever lost -
taken from your hand.
Your pain
runs deep,
And teaches -
while night is closing
In .
GlennAllen#: Posted by on 04/11 at 09:26 AM - A truly wonderful post. It really needs to be seen by many more poeple.
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I've been reading Pharyngula for some time, but now I have to comment. This is beautiful, and profound. Thank you.
#: Posted by Maureen Lycaon on 04/11 at 01:11 PM
- Thank you. I'm moved.
- This is a perfect example of how blogging is humanity's hope for harnessing reality! Namaste.
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"Unrecorded, unrenowned,
Men from whom my ways begin,
Here I know you by your ground
But I know you not within―
There is silence, there survives
Not a moment of your lives."
from "Forefathers", by Edmund Blunden
Thanks.#: Posted by on 04/11 at 05:50 PM -
That was truly beautiful and moving. Thank you.
#: Posted by senoritafish on 04/11 at 07:04 PM
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Fantastic!
#: Posted by on 04/11 at 07:36 PM
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A pixel is worth a thousand words, except when PZ writes... the bastard. Why can't I write like that?
#: Posted by John Wilkins on 04/11 at 08:32 PM
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This is what I say about this essay in my Carnival of the Vanities roundup:
I'm a regular reader of Pharyngula and for me, it's up there as one of the great blogs. PZ Myers is a voice of reason in a world occasionally mad, a staunch defender of science and what it means to us. But this essay about the depth of our shared human experience is something else. Bloggetry of a level far beyond the mundane stuff that fills this carnival. A post to be proud of. A piece of compelling beauty. Read it! If this doesn't get the hairs on the back of your neck erect, you're beyond help. -
This one's a keeper.
#: Posted by on 04/11 at 09:45 PM
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I hate to rock the boat here, but although that was a thoughtful essay, and expressed quite elegantly the idea that the history we know of is only a small part of human history. However, it seems to imply that this makes the Bible somehow less relevant. A secular/humanist view of the world is fine by me, but is it necessary to cast doubt on the relevance of the Bible in order to add meaning to one's own view?
For those who accept human evolution and creation at the same time (an evolving creation), these thoughts do nothing to diminish the value or truth of the Bible, which it is not necessary to interpret literally. I am sure God found other ways of communicating with humanity before the written word.#: Posted by on 04/12 at 06:56 AM -
PZ's essay does nothing to "make the Bible less relevant" or "diminish the value or the truth of the Bible". The fact that his description of it fails to unduly elevate it and revere it as a religious person would, is no criticism of his essay.
Just being able to construct an interpretation of the Bible that harmonizes with evolution doesn't lend extra credence to the Bible. -
I'll also add a note of discord to this. Were the Bible merely a historical volume, Mr. Myers' thoughts would be squarely on target. However, it aims to be much more, and arguably succeeds: it's a description of coming to moral self-awareness, moral laws, and to the primacy of love and mercy. It seems unduly reductionist to have the time span it covers serve as a proxy for its contents.
I think I share Mr. Myers' awe of the world and life as it is, and I hold no brief for people who insist on inflicting narrow, faith-based versions of reality on the rest of us. But I think this particular effort to quantify the Bible's share of human wisdom founders on a view of its meaning that is too narrow.#: Posted by Thomas Nephew on 04/12 at 08:52 AM -
Thomas Nephew says:
However, it aims to be much more...
Your unquestioned assumptions are clear. Referring to a collection of writings by various writers as "it" and giving it a singular voice shows that you're attributing more to the Bible than it deserves. You're wanting PZ to inflict your faith-based version of reality on his readers. -
As I said in the essay, you are free to assume as great a magnitude as you want for the Bible; I don't share that elevated opinion of it, but it doesn't matter. All your grand estimation of the Bible means is that little rectangular icon I drew stands for something even more immense than I give it credit for, and implies that what we have lost in prehistory is even larger.
But I suspect that those who disagree are instead doing something I find objectionable: they want to diminish the importance of that vast weight of humanity that does not have and never had their one particular, narrow little icon of supremacy. And in that sense, you are correct. I am saying that the Bible is not the absolute pinnacle of history, the be-all and end-all. It's just one book. One. -
Virge: point taken. Substitute "its authors".
PZ: "I suspect that those who disagree ... want to diminish the importance of that vast weight of humanity that does not have and never had their one particular, narrow little icon of supremacy."
I was all set to disagree. But you also imply a proportionality that seems unlikely to me: All your grand estimation of the Bible means is that little rectangular icon I drew stands for something even more immense than I give it credit for, and implies that what we have lost in prehistory is even larger.
We'd not expect that at all of a book about the rules of say, geometry or physics. Pre-2000BC humanity, for all its intrinsic value, could not have added content proportional to its longevity (or probably even proportional to its share of the total population of humanity) to that store of knowledge, to the extent it had time to be interested.
Now, ethics is less of an exhaustible topic than geometry and it's perhaps less rigorously discussable than physics, but I would argue similar nonproportional estimates apply.
So on reflection perhaps I am indeed diminishing the importance of pre-2000BC humanity. I don't ascribe significance to humanity's numbers or longevity, I ascribe it to its achievements. The Bible, while a flawed human achievement, is one that we can see all the same. You suggest pre-biblical "hominidity", to perhaps coin a phrase, produced its own wisdom. Perhaps, but where is it? How much of it was there likely to have been? Show me. My assumptions differ from yours.
Let me be clear: I'm a skeptic (by self-definition, anyway) and definitely not a church-goer. Somewhat to my own surprise, I hold the Bible in higher esteem -- as an attempted summation of moral principles -- than this essay does, as I do the Koran and other overlapping works about religion, ethics, and morality. That's partly out of respect (perhaps superstitious respect), and partly out of my simple understanding of humanity's ability to generate and accumulate cultural capital.#: Posted by Thomas Nephew on 04/12 at 12:21 PM -
Love of beauty and elegance; the sense of tragedy and loss; the longing for joy: these are only a few of the emotions and thoughts that separate us from the animals from which (I believe) we evolved. Where and when did that separation occur? Was it sudden; was it gradual? Do these attributes hint that there may be truth to the iconographic phrase "In the Image of God He created them", regardless of the cosmology of the person or persons who wrote those words? Definitely a good essay to read as the days count down to Eastern Orthodox Pascha, the celebration of the triumph of Life over death and decay.
#: Posted by on 04/12 at 01:15 PM
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Stephen Early asks,
Do these attributes hint that there may be truth to the iconographic phrase "In the Image of God He created them"?
Um, probably not. As it stands, the evidence has shown quite the opposite; that is, we (Homo sapiens) have actually created God in the image of man.
It turns out that we're not quite as creative as we once believed.#: Posted by on 04/12 at 01:38 PM -
Thomas Nephew wrote:
So on reflection perhaps I am indeed diminishing the importance of pre-2000BC humanity. I don't ascribe significance to humanity's numbers or longevity, I ascribe it to its achievements.
If you would define what you mean by achievements, that would help me to understand better what you are talking about. Do you mean, for example, that humans are the only animals you ascribe significance to, because they are the only ones who produce books and skyscrapers? Or am I misunderstanding your point about achievements?#: Posted by on 04/12 at 02:26 PM -
I think that "normalizing" for population size, or "achievements" - whatever they are - defeats the purpose of the PZ's visual metaphor. What is covered by the Bible is just a small snippet of human history, sovering some people and some events over a very limited portion of human history. It may be a great document, and surely one of the earliest. Don't you wish Lucy and millions of others over hundreds of thousands of years were able to read and write and leave us stories about their societies and their personal lives. I bet it would be fascinating! So much history completely lost that we can only imagine (or write bad fiction like The Clan of the Cave Bear) the details!
But let's say that we want to normalize for population size and/or "achievement" and agree what "achievement" means: perhaps growing understanding of how the world works, or better and fairer social organization, or growth in moral and ethical thought and behavior. In each of those cases, one could argue that there was a slow growth before the historical (Biblical) times, thus the volumes would be slim and not too informative. But consider the time AFTER the biblical times: population explosion, scientific revolution, exponential advances in technology, great improvement in social relations (no matter what you think about him , GW Bush is NOT a pharaoh), and great advances in moral and ethical thinking (we do not consider other races, children and women propert of white males any more - though see the "Minnesota" post for some exceptions) would force us to depict the volumes since the Bible thousands of times thicker. Heck, just the last 100 years would deserve at least a thousand black bars for the metaphor to hold.
So, demeaning pre-biblical "books" in relation to the Bible bites you in the ass: same logic can be used to demean the Bible in favor of more recent "books". Just re-read the post and try to see what PZ was really tring to accomplish with his visual metaphor. -
So, demeaning pre-biblical "books" in relation to the Bible bites you in the ass: same logic can be used to demean the Bible in favor of more recent "books".
Only if you can assume that the relevant accumulation of knowledge continues. Euclidean geometry was largely done with Euclid, I imagine.
Again, I don't doubt there were achievements. Just spreading across the planet was an achievement. But I certainly don't think they were proportional to time elapsed, and I doubt they were proportional to lives lived. There may have been early Bible-/Koran-/Buddhist-like consenses about ethical behavior as well, and there may have been important, distinct alternatives whose loss we'd mourn if we could somehow learn of them. But I'd venture there were few, just because the number of available authors was few, and the available additional insights to them were few as well. "Be fruitful and multiply" was probably job 1 through 10 back in the good old, old days.
My argument is simply that the post's proportionality schtick is reductive and ultimately disrespectful of the very humanity and its history that the essay purports to celebrate; it's problematic as well in that it uses a complex piece of literature and argumentation like the Bible as its measuring stick. (@Raven: given that, yes, I'm talking about cultural things like books and skyscrapers. So was PZ, or he shouldn't have picked the Bible as the unit of measurement.)
The Bible, like other good literature, distills experience. The distillation will not be proportional to the time span involved, there will be diminishing returns. You only tell the tale of Eve weeping over Abel once, even if it happened 100 or 800 times -- in fact, especially if it happened 100 or 800 times.
But yes, coturnix, I'll re-read the post; maybe with repeated effort I'll be able to join you in unreserved celebration.#: Posted by Thomas Nephew on 04/12 at 04:31 PM -
<i>However, it </i>[the Bible] <i>aims to be much more, and arguably succeeds: it's a description of coming to moral self-awareness, moral laws, and to the primacy of love and mercy. It seems unduly reductionist to have the time span it covers serve as a proxy for its contents.</i>
That "coming to moral self-awareness" did not end with the Bible. Many people, Christian and otherwise, have and continue to explore morality, love and mercy. One of my favorites was a man of the 19th Century, "Mark Twain", aka Samuel Clemens. Not via his Mississippi writings (well, there, too), but in his "Letters from the Earth", "Papers of the Adam Family", to his numerous essays such as "To the Person Sitting in Darkness", "The Damned Human Race", "Was the World Made for Man?" (which is reflected in this essay) and the list goes on.
May that exploration continue unabated, and somehow find its way into the current political hurricane.#: Posted by on 04/12 at 07:59 PM -
am very impressed.
I found you from Dr Zen's
Carnival Hosting of #134
I won't follow the arguments of the comments here,
I notice that there are a few, nor will I justify
my own or yours.
I may merely offer that the breadth and scope of
the mind, open enough, to muse the uncountable
moments of eternity as reflected by scattered
and isolated measurable events is magnificent.
I had a wonderful read. Thank you this much:
( and a littlle bit more. . . )
Okay,
Father Luke#: Posted by father Luke on 04/13 at 04:23 PM -
This is a wonderful essay, and a powerful use of illustration. There is another, even larger view possible. Imagine, if you will, the volumes that could be filled by the "ultimate observer" of just the short (relatively speaking) history of our planet. At a modest 4 billion years, there would be 2 million Bible-sized books for our planet alone. I can't make myself believe that only human history, or technoligical human history, is relevant.
While the Bible intends to be a summation of things learned by man to that point, it is neither all-inclusive, or universally agreed upon in it's content. There is not a single hint of what was going on in the future United States, for example.
I see the Bible as, in fact, less than the total history of the span for which it is being credited. Far more happened in that period, much of it undoubtedly very different from the distilled moral and cultural views recorded in the Bible.
This is an accident of geography and limited knowlege. A true history of 2000 years of the Earth would be much larger than the reference Book in question. With or without a human presence.#: Posted by on 04/14 at 05:35 PM - I followed a link here, and wanted to tell you how very much I enjoyed this essay. I've been thinking a fair bit about story, scripture, death, and bones myself this week (between a pair of Torah portions I find challenging to engage with, and my first experience with a dead body) and your essay really resonated with me. Thanks.
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Pz Myers very eloquently expressed what I hold to be the foundation of my own classroom teaching, that time passes and we are a "blip" on the vast scale of the universe, existing in the here and now and being able to communicate and share is all there is to "this" life, so let's be creative about it!
Learning and sharing is what stimulates us. When we fail to be stimulated by anything, we don't "live" anymore.
I like celebrating differences and respecting them for what creative ideas they produce.
I dislike the oversimplification of the doctrine of most formal religions that and how it stifles individuality and passes judgement. There are other ways to express reverence for those in the past and present and future.
Who's to say what is the "right" way to live or express themselves?
You either find a way to share in the idea or not...#: Posted by on 04/17 at 03:04 PM -
I think of the great books of the major religions as funnels, (prosaic, but it does the job). They represent accumulations and coalescences of beliefs that have been hung together from many different previous sources and times.
In that sense, they can all stand for strands of thought and experience which are much longer and spread over many cultures. They are a kind of thinking and emotional geology.
But it is a grave mistake, surely, to think that the wisdom preserved is thereby more important or deeper or truer than belief systems which were not inked onto a page. And how many people who make that judgement can say they truly understand any of the surviving tribal religions?
Imagine the moment when a tribal Indian in the Amazon stands in front of a bulldozer. She defends a world view and contemplative practice dedicated for generation upon generation to understanding how humans fit into the natural world. The bulldozer driver is a religious man - he has a Bible in his pocket.
Tell me again how wonderful and wise that book is. How it represents the peak of human ethical contemplation.
Oh that's right, all those people who lived out all those other bibles in this lovely essay are just superstitious. We will make them change their minds.#: Posted by David Tiley on 05/03 at 08:04 PM -
Damn, that's good. Thanks for sharing it with us. It's the best, most reverential expression of scientific humanism I've run across, and the one most likely to really change hearts and minds.
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I see comments are still open.
Thanks, PZ, I will scarf this for a friend of what I think is the born-again persuasion, with ID flavorings.#: Posted by John M. Price on 06/05 at 08:00 PM -
You know, I might even move some of this to ritual if you don't mind.
http://www.spiritualhumanism.org
The magic free spirituality....#: Posted by John M. Price on 06/05 at 08:13 PM